U of T slips to 21st in world rank

Queen’s tumbles from top 200 in renowned education survey

The University of Toronto is still Canada’s top institution of higher learning, but it has slipped internationally, as have several Canadian schools, according to a leading world ranking.

U of T fell from the top 20 to become 21st worldwide in 2012-13, according to the The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, released Wednesday. It was 19th last year.

The University of British Columbia, Canada’s second-ranked, fell further, from 22nd to 30th place.

Queen’s University fell from the top 200, and is ranked in a range of 201-225, down from 173 last year.

Major gains were made in AsiaPacific countries, with losses for leading Western institutions.

David Naylor, president of U of T, called it a “concerning trend.” “This is a bit of wakeup call. It’s not a huge alarm bell, but I think we ignore this set of signposts at our peril,” he said. Naylor took no particular comfort in U of T’s top Canadian ranking. “We’re all Canadians. We need strong universities coast to coast.” But unless governments allocate a portion of funding according to continuous competitive performance, some of Canada’s researchintensive universities will lose ground, he said. “You need a few contenders in the gold medal race.” He stressed he is not advocating that the government pick winners, but that it adopt a system similar to the United Kingdom’s, where funding comes in two tranches: one for teaching and the other for research and graduate education. The leading university worldwide, for the second year in a row, is the California Institute of Technology, followed by Oxford and Stanford, which tied for second place, then Harvard. McGill, the third-ranked Canadi- an university, placed 34th, down from 28th in 2011-12. McMaster, the fourth ranked in Canada, placed 88th overall, down from 65th.

The University of Montreal, Canada’s fifth-ranked, rose dramatically to 84th from 104th last year.

James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, says such rankings do an injustice to the complexities of universities and are virtually useless. “This is a very precise ranking built on a soft underbelly of mushy data.”